US utility company Southern California Edison (SCE) has announced that it will procure 261MW of grid-connected storage capacity from a handful of suppliers, after a competitive solicitation process.

The emerging availability of storage and smart-grid technologies allows communities to meet their energy demands locally. As Andrew Jones of S&C Electric writes, community-owned micro-grids will become an increasingly important element of the future energy system.

Energy storage has been touted as the enabler of high levels of intermittent renewables in the electricity system – the silver bullet or Holy Grail for solar and wind. A key attribute for the technology’s deployment will be scalability, writes Melissa Lott.

California governor, Jerry Brown, is expected imminently to sign off new legislation extending a funding programme said to be a vital lifeline for the state’s nascent energy storage sector.

Fuel cells for distributed generation will be developed through 13 new projects that have been announced by Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), the US government agency responsible for promoting funding and RnD into advanced energy technologies.

Sunverge, a California-based provider of distributed energy storage and control systems, has closed a US$15 million funding round that it said would support its expansion.